Stranglehold (2 page)

She wished they were dead. Then she wished she were dead.

Because she'd disobeyed again.

She should never have come along.

Her mom and her daddy both had warned her against the place.
You're not to go there under any circumstances
her mom had said.

But there were not many kids around and no girls at all to play with and you had to have
somebody
. And sometimes Billy and Jimmy were nice to her. Sometimes she'd get through an entire day without getting pushed or pinched or hit.

Like she was really somebody's sister.

So she'd told them okay even though she knew it was probably going to turn out wrong someway, even though she had to trust the boys completely, depending on them to even get her
up
here because it was way off the trail and she'd never even seen this part of the woods before.

She was actually kind of ... lost.

Even if she got out of here.

She thought that if she had to stay here all night she'd go crazy.

There was a story Jimmy told about the swamp.

He said his older brother Mike had been up here alone a long time ago and he'd seen something in the water, that it had looked like a log at first but when Mike came closer he saw it was a man, a dead man with half his face chopped off—cut absolutely, completely clean from head to chin so that one open eye was staring at him, the other eye gone, half the nose split right down the middle and half the mouth open in a great big
O
so that Mike said the guy looked sort of surprised more than anything else and in the back of the head he could see this mess of brain and blood and bone. He ran for the police and brought them an hour later to the very same spot, but by then the guy was gone. The guy had disappeared. They looked everywhere.

Jimmy was a liar and so was his big brother Mike but Jimmy always said that now the guy haunted the place. That you could hear him at night moaning through half a mouth, breathing heavy through half a nose, dragging himself through the dirty snake-, frog-, and leech-infested water.

It was only a story.

But if she stayed here all night she'd go crazy. She was trembling all over.

It was getting dark.

"Mommy," she whispered.

She heard footsteps. Sloshing through the mud. Coming toward her.

"
Mommy
," she said.

Thinking about the dead man.

Not
help
but
mommy
.

Her long brown pigtail caught on rough weathered wood as she slid away from the door, her scalp burning as a clutch of hair pulled free. She got to her feet and ran to the wall farthest away. She felt tiny splinters of the old rotten wood nip the palm of her hand. She pressed back against it anyway, facing the door.

"
That's right
," said Jimmy. "Call your
mommy
."

He flung open the door. The hinges screamed.

"
Sissy!
"

He ran. Billy was right behind him.

"Wait!" she cried. She ran after them.

Bog muck sucked at her galoshes, splattered her bare legs and her shorts. She plunged through it. But she was never as fast as they were. Never. Not even close.

By the time she was out of the swamp they were up the hill and into the trees.

By the time she made it up the hill she couldn't see them at all.

She was alone again.

It was full dusk. Just minutes from darkness. The thick trees and brush almost made it seem as though it were already dark.

Which way?

She thought that maybe . . .

She walked the crest of one hill to another. Over that to another. She was scared and she was crying. Each hill looked the same as the one before it and none of them were familiar. Brush and evergreen and pale white birch and thick, nasty tangles of thorn. She moved as fast as she could. Against time and darkness.

She stumbled, fell, scraped her knee on a rock and felt her funny bone tingle and go all numb and then start to hurt bad, throbbing, and felt the splinters lodge deeper into the palm of her hand. She stumbled again seconds later on a log half-buried under leaves and fell to her side.

Onto the path.

Well-trod, hard-packed earth.

And now she knew and recognized that big rock over there, just ahead of her, peppered with fool's gold.
Jimmy'd
stood on it on the way here.

Yes!

She was not going to die out here after all, starved or killed by crazy people or bit by snakes, she was not even going to hear the sound of the breathing of the ghost of the split-skull man. She was going to make it home.

Tears streamed down her muddy cheeks. It was hard to believe a person could feel this good and this bad both at the same time. Her heart pounded with relief.

She made her way home.

Her father was waiting for her on the porch. He had a beer and he was still in his shirtsleeves from the bank and he was sitting in his rocking chair listening while she tried to explain.

She could see her mother in the doorway, watching from behind the screen, hands resting on her swollen belly. Her mom was eight months pregnant.

When she was finished telling her story her father set the beer down and then stood up and walked over to her, standing at the very edge of the porch.

"What is wrong with you?" he said. "Where is your intelligence? Where are your
brains
, Lydia? Don't you have any brains
at all
?"

She could think of nothing to say. She picked at her splinters. Her hand hurt. Her knee hurt. The knee was even bleeding. Didn't he care?

"Am I raising a
stupid
child, Lydia? I think I am." Her mother opened the screen door behind him.

"Russell ..."

It was as though her mother weren't even there.

"Listen to me. You're not a
boy
,
Liddy
. Boys do things that are sometimes dangerous, sometimes foolish. You could say that's part of being a boy. Part of how boys grow up. But you are not supposed to be out doing the kinds of things that boys do. Do you understand that? Is this too
difficult
for you?"

"No."

She thought she was going to start to cry again. She wondered if the baby in mama's belly would be a boy.

"
No
what
?"

"No, sir."

His pale blue eyes bore into her.

"All right. I don't know why I even have to tell you all this." He shook his head. "Honestly. Sometimes I don't know where the hell it is you came from." He turned and sat down in the rocker.

"Your supper's cold," he said. "And it'll damn well
stay
cold. Now get upstairs and clean yourself up. You'll wash those clothes yourself, young lady. Understand me?"

"Yes, sir."

She took off her muddy galoshes and placed them to one side beside the porch. Daddy sipped his beer and didn't say anything and didn't look at her. At least he wasn't going to hit her this time. Her mother opened the door for her, then stood aside as she climbed the stairs to her room.

She sat down on the bed and then remembered that she was dirty and that the bed was clean. She got up and brushed off the bed cover, limped down the hall to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror.

The face staring back at her was dirty and tear-streaked, sad-eyed and dopey-looking. Her pigtails were a mess and studded with burrs and twigs and hunks of leaves.

She felt as lonely as she had in the cabin.

Almost.

A little less scared, that's all.

Ellsworth, New Hampshire

August 1962

The boy lay listening in the dark steamy crawl space beneath the stairs. His mother was standing right above him, talking to Officer Duggan.

He could hear them perfectly.

"I'm not waiting any twenty-four hours, Ralph Duggan," his mother was saying. "No way I am. You're
standin
' right here, right now and I'm telling you."

"Ruth ..."

"Don't 'Ruth' me. I knew you when you were Arthur's age, didn't I? That's right. You're damn well right I did. Now
you
tell
me
—would your mama have waited any twenty-four hours? Answer me that."

Arthur could hear Officer Duggan sigh. He knew what it was like to try to talk to his mother. He lay way back in the dark and didn't move an inch.

He stared through the wooden latticework and then through the overgrown bushes and hardscrabble grass. Even though it was getting on to dusk he could see almost all the way over the hill to the bridge and the beaver pond from here. He'd sneak down there sometimes while they were asleep.

The boy could see out but they couldn't see in. It was much too dark back here until your eyes adjusted and that took a while. His mother had already tried.

"The problem is, Ruth, we got no men to spare just now. Damn brushfire's pinning us all down. We got people come all the way over from Compton to help us out. Troopers, volunteers. But with this breeze and the land being this dry ... hell, you can smell the smoke yourself from here. We'll be on this thing half the night as it is."

"I don't care about any brushfire. What I care
about's
my boy."

"You want your house to go up in flames, Ruth? It could, if we don't stop the damn thing."

"That fire's half a mile away."

"That's right. And the wind's blowing right in your direction. You got the
Wingerter
place and then you. Harry, talk to her, will you?"

It was the first the boy was even aware his father was there. His father could move as quiet as an Apache if he wanted to.

Unless he was drunk.

A brown wood spider was moving across the back of the boy's left hand. Crawling up toward his wrist.

He knew that the spider's bite could be nasty but he wasn't afraid of anything that small.

Certain people, yes.

Spiders, no.

Though spiders disgusted him.

He couldn't risk slapping it, though. They might hear. Instead he reached over slowly with his right hand and firmly crushed its body against his wrist. The spider went wet and sticky. He rubbed the spot until the wet was dry and only the sticky stuff remained.

He'd done okay. The spider hadn't bitten.

"It doesn't matter what my husband's got to say on the matter," his mother was saying. "That boy's never missed a single Sunday dinner in his life. Wouldn't
dare
to miss it. Nope. Something's wrong here. You and me, Ralph Duggan, we're going looking for that boy, and you'll walk right over to that car there and call in a proper missing persons report or else I'll step inside for a moment and you'll go looking with me at the point of a shotgun. How's that?"